Highland Woodworking Blog

Father’s Day is just past and I have thoroughly enjoyed my gift from Highland.  I was cruising around on the web site and I came across a set of DVDs called “Hands”.

Hands have always been a topic of interest to me.  My family had a dairy farm when I was growing up and we did a lot of stuff outside and subjected our hands to a lot of abuse.  When I think of my father, one thing I carry with me that reminds me of my father is that little bit of skin between the thumb and the first finger of my hands.  My Dad’s hands were always worn and cracked and that bit of skin (there’s probably a name for it) was characteristic of him.  When I work outside in cold weather, my hands crack and split as his hands did, and that little connection with him now gone for nearly fifty years, reappears on me.  I show it to people who may remember him as I do.

“Hands” is a series of documentary films made in Ireland during the 1980’s.  They document traditional Irish crafts and craftspeople, some of which have disappeared by now, I’m sure.  There are 37 videos on many different subjects ranging from patchwork and lace to hurl making to bookbinding and bespoke handmade shoes.

I have a problem in wanting to do everything I see, and when I watch these films I am checking off the tools to see which ones I don’t already have.  Question is whether it is worth while buying the tools and spending the time it takes to get really good at some of these trades.  These people make it look so easy, probably because they have been doing it for generations.   I mean how long does it take to learn to be a cooper anyway?

One thing which I really enjoyed was how the craftspeople all took the filming so seriously.  I noticed that they all dressed for the occasion.  Even in the one where they are making clay pipe for sewers, which has to be an incredibly dirty process, they all wore a nice tweed jacket — almost as if the boss said, all right we are going to be in the movies tomorrow, be sure you look nice.

All in all, a great series of films.   My favorites so far, coopering, bookbinders, and the shoemaker.  I looked up the shoemaker on line and they are still in business.  You can order your own pair of bespoke handmade shoes for about 200 pounds for the first measurement and custom lasts, and then after that, it will cost you about 500 pounds for a pair of what they say are the best fitting shoes you will ever have.  I’m glad they are still out there.

For the past few weeks, our bloggers have been hard at work in their woodworking shops. Not only are they working on their gifts for friends and family this holiday season, but they have also been working on their 2013 Holiday Woodworking Tool Wish Lists. In case you are still working on yours (or haven’t even started), here are a few of our own wish lists. And don’t forget to make your own woodworking wish list on our website by CLICKING HERE.

First up we’ve got Terry Chapman:

It’s that time again. I went by Highlan this week to look around at what is new and to see what might catch my eye for Christmas. My son lives way up north in Connecticut and is not the least bit interested in woodworking nor does he have a lot of money to spend on Christmas gifts for me. I feel an obligation to make a list of some of the things I would like to have which do not cost an arm and a leg. I pretty much have all the woodworking tools you can get which cost less than $300 and that narrows the choices down pretty good for a kid trying to survive the heating season way up north on a preacher’s salary.

Flex Arm Work Light

Here you go, Jon. I like the Magnetic LED Work Light for my lathe. This light is excellent on many counts. It has a long flexible neck, a magnetic base which goes vertical and horizontal and actually has a switch which turns the magnet off and on (how does that work?). It uses an 8 watt LED bulb which puts out a lot of light and is rated at 50,000 hours. The thing I like best is it puts focused beams of white light about four feet away and will light up the bottom of a turning bowl when I set it on the lathe bed. The only one I have seen which is better is the one my dentist has on a track above the chair to light up your mouth. The dental light probably costs $3000 used. The one at Highland is my choice.

When I was in the store last week, there is a whole wall of what I would call Viking axes. These are beautiful pieces of work signed by the smith who forged it. The one I like best is the Gransfors Bruks Double Bit Axe. If I were a lot younger, I could bring down a redwood tree with this thing. You know those old pictures where the lumberjack is standing on a spring board about forty feet in the air notching out for a saw cut on a 1500 year old tree about 60 feet in diameter, that would be me.

Viking Axes

Actually, this one is designed for throwing competitions. It even comes with competition axe-throwing rules and the address of the Swedish Axe Throwing Society. How cool is that!!?? They better ship a trauma wound kit with it if I am going to throw it. My first thought when I saw the axe wall — Road Rage!! How cool would it be when some guy cuts you off on the freeway and starts toward you with a baseball bat and you pull out a Viking Axe? Plus think about Show and Tell at your grandkid’s school. Good one.

Double Bit Throwing Axe

I always like books and there are some wonderful woodworking books out there. Here are a some new ones available at Highland this Christmas:

To Make as Perfectly as Possible by Roubo. This is a new translation of a French classic on an 18th century cabinet shop. Now it sounds like it would be terrible stuff what with no power tools and modern conveniences. What is does have is the back to basics stuff we all need on sharpening tools, selecting wood, staining and finishing, and all the other things you need to dig up from time to time. Nothing but good reviews on this one.

The Practical Woodworker A Four Volume Set by Bernard E. Jones. Originally published in 1916 and recently reissued, this is another back to basics volume. I was flipping through one volume and there is a whole chapter on joinery in “Aeroplanes.” Been a long time since I saw an article about that, but you know it has a lot of good stuff if it has a section on aeroplanes in it. If you are in the middle of a WWI Sopwith Camel and are stuck on how to attach the wings to the body, this may do it for you. Highly recommended.

With the Grain – A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood by Christian Becksvoort. I am a big fan of Christian Becksvoort. He is so down to earth that he has a blog where he averages one blog entry every three months if he thinks about it. He makes the most beautiful Shaker furniture and I would buy all he makes if I could afford it. He donated a lovely Shaker Candle Stand to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village for a raffle. I bought tickets for the drawing on December 7th and I would really treasure that thing. Please do not buy tickets and decrease my chances to win: http://chbecksvoort.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/shaker-roundstand-raffle/. We would all be better woodworkers if we understood our material as well as this guy does. Read this book.

And one last tool is the Galbert Drawsharp by Benchcrafted. This one is high on my list. I struggle with sharpening and I am afraid to sharpen my drawknife for fear I will mess it up completely and make a chisel driven tool out of it. That would be sad because I like what it can do and I am getting better using it. Peter has designed a tool to sharpen the thing and it runs off the rear of the blade for reference.

Galbert Drawsharp

Looks like it works like a champ and you can ask Pete about it in March when once again he comes to Highland to teach a chairmaking class.

There you go, Jono.

Ever since I managed to cut a circle on a piece of thin plywood several months ago, I have been thinking I need to get the splitter back on my table saw.  I have a 10 inch Delta Unisaw in my shop and after watching Mr. Norm use the same saw for years and years (actually his show is why I bought the saw), in spite of that little message about “the saw guard was removed for photographic purposes”, I took the splitter and the saw guard off and set them in the corner of the shop.

When that piece of plywood kicked back on me, flew by my head and bounced off the wall ten feet behind me, that was a wake-up call sure enough.  I kept looking for alternatives since I really do not like the blade covered up for dadoes and grooves and those partial cuts we always want to make.  I saw the Micro Jig MJ Splitter at the High and since I am not ready to spring for a new table saw, anything that makes this one safer is a good thing.  Starting at $24.99 for the standard duty model, this Splitter is an excellent solution for updating an old saw.

MDF Template with Jig in place for Drilling

The package comes with complete instructions of course, but you will need a blank table insert and a piece of 1/2 inch MDF.   The kit comes with four screws, a drill bit and a jig needed to locate the holes required for the splitter to work correctly.  Once you saw a slot in the MDF and attach the jig, drill the holes in the table insert and it is done.  The standard duty model comes with two hard plastic inserts with legs that fit into the holes located with the jig.

I am not a machinist so I don’t deal in thousandths of an inch.  In fact, I love rough framing a house because you can deal in eighths of an inch with no major problems (no cards and letters, please). What was surprising to me was the two inserts are made with different offsets to the drilled holes so you can adjust the splitter to the blade and to how your saw cuts.  Using either side of each insert, you have a choice of four offsets, each of which is 0.003 inches more than the other.  When I had my splitter installed, I popped one in and did a test cut.  I was thinking, “yeah, right, my blade has more wobble than that”.  Wrong–I could not push the board through with the maximum offset on the splitter.  Had to very carefully turn the saw off and pull the board out and try another insert.  The directions say that when you have the correct insert in place it has a “feather board” effect on the cut piece and develops a slight pressure towards the fence at the rear of the blade.  It works for me and I feel much safer with the splitter in place.

Micro Jig makes two versions, the standard with the solid plastic splitters which I bought, and the Pro version, which has four steel splitters with a plastic coating.  I will be interested to see how the standard version holds up in my shop.

The Finished Splitter in place

Based on my impression of this kit, I am certainly going to look at the rest of the equipment offered by the Micro Jig people including the GRR-Ripper System and the MicroDial Tapering Jig.  I like what I see so far.

I just got back from a week at John Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. I drove up about two and half hours from South Atlanta on Sunday and made it in time to register and attend the orientation. I met my classmates and the instructor and we went over to our classroom for our initial instruction before we came back to the dining hall for supper.

John C. Campbell Folk School is located in the lovely Great Smokey Mountains of western North Carolina near Murphy. It was founded in the1920’s and is still going strong with something like 800 classes taught each year. Instructors and students come from all over and live in dorms on the campus and have meals family style in the dining hall and then collect for a “Show and Tell” at the end of the week. Last week they had Marquetry, Woodturning, Woodcarving, Wool, Photography, Blacksmithing, Cooking, Native Flute, Collage, and Pottery as I recall.

Something to aspire to, but overwhelming on Day One.

I went to Campbell this time to take a course in carving the head of a carousel horse. The instructor was Ira Chaffin, who runs a sculpture studio over in Birmingham and is a skilled instructor endowed with loads of patience for a bunch of beginners. I learned that since carousels in America turn counterclockwise, the decorations are mostly on the right side of the horse to be visible to folks waiting in line. Horses are different sizes depending on the row — inside, middle, or outside, where they will travel. Outside horses are bigger since the outside row is longer.

Carving Blanks

We started the week with whatever tools we had all brought with us, along with tools furnished by the school, and Ira’s personal tools, plus band-aids all around. I personally started the week with a purist attitude about the tools. If you don’t use classic carving gouges and a wooden mallet, then you are not paying proper homage to the profession. Grinling Gibbons would have been proud. By the end of the week, if I had brought my chain saw, I would have been there with it. Anything to get the wood off and get a horse head.

Ira furnished a carving blank glued up out of two by basswood planks on which he traced a pattern. He cut the horse head on the blank which gave us a good start. After some discussion about grain and how to handle it with a chisel, we were off. One of us had no experience at all, one had lots of woodworking but little carving, and the other was in the class for the second time since she wanted to do some extra on her head. With only three students, we each had lots of instructor time.

Wednesday Morning

The first day, we carved and carved and carved and then after that we carved some more. And after we had carved a while longer, it was time for lunch. Want to hear the cliches? “Carving is easy, go down to the skin and stop.” “I just look at the block of stone and take away everything that doesn’t belong.” Basswood is soft at the beginning of the day when the tools are sharp. As the day wears on, the tools start to lose their edge, and you get tired, then the wood gets tougher. By the end of day three, it is like carving walnut burl.

When you are just beginning, the biggest fear is carving off too much wood and getting to a place where you can’t recover. The only thing to do is to keep carving down until it gets right again and then you may only have a colt head instead of a horse head. I came up with a new invention, which I am going to try to have the High stock from now on. It answers that fear of too much removal perfectly. I call it the “WoodPutterBackerOner”. I could sell a million of ‘em. Especially at the wood carving school.

I had a great time, I got a decent horse out of it, I met some nice people and I got out of town for a week. I recommend it highly. By the way, I named mine Dan Patch after the song lyric from “The Music Man’ about trouble right here in River City “… stuck-up jockey boy sitting on Dan Patch”. You can look it up.

Class Photo
Redenta, Marcie, Ira, Terry
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